How to do OCR processing with PHP and Tesseract

OCR (Optical Character Recognition, optical character recognition) is a technology that converts text in images into computer-readable text. It helps you convert text in images into editable text. In this article, we will introduce how to use PHP and the OCR engine Tesseract for OCR processing.

1. Installing Tesseract

First, we need to install the Tesseract OCR engine. Tesseract is an open source OCR engine developed by Google. It recognizes multiple text languages ​​and works on many different platforms.

When installing Tesseract on a Linux system, you can use the following command:

sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr

On a Windows system, you can install it from Tesseract’s official website (https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract ) Download the installer and install it.

2. Install PHP extension

Next, we need to install the PHP extension to use Tesseract. PHP has an OCR extension called "tesseract" which allows us to use the Tesseract engine in PHP.

On Linux systems, you can use the following command to install:

sudo apt-get install php-tesseract

On Windows systems, you can download the extension from PECL (http://pecl.php.net/package/tesseract) and Install. The following line can be added to the php.ini file to enable the extension:

extension=tesseract.so

3. Recognize text

Next, we will use PHP and Tesseract to identify text in an image text.

First, we need to prepare a picture that contains the text that needs to be recognized. Suppose we have an image named "example.png", we will use the following code to identify the text in it:

<?php
    function recognize_text($filename) {
        $tesseract = new TesseractOCR($filename);
        $tesseract->setLanguage('eng');
        $tesseract->setTempDir('/tmp');
        return $tesseract->recognize();
    }

    $filename = 'example.png';
    $text = recognize_text($filename);
    echo $text;
?>

In the above code, we have used the TesseractOCR class to identify the text in the image. The constructor of this class requires a file name parameter, which is the file name of the image that needs to be OCR processed.

The setLanguage() method specifies the recognition language to be used, here we specify English. The setTempDir() method sets the directory used to store temporary files during the recognition process. Finally, we call the recognize() method to perform OCR processing and return or output the results.

4. Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to do OCR processing using PHP and Tesseract. We first installed the Tesseract OCR engine and tesseract extension, and then used PHP code to recognize the text in an image. Using OCR technology helps us extract editable text from images, which can be applied to various scenarios, such as scanning documents, digital archives, etc.

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